The Head

I am starting my journey as anatomical cartographer with disorders of the head. I will travel through art, literature, case studies and medical narratives to map our stories and experiences of life with illness.

Migraine Register by Lorie Novak

I recently became aware of the self portraiture work of Lorie Novak and her project, Migraine Register. Since 2009 Lorie has been taking pictures of herself when she has a migraine, which can be as many as 10-15 times a month. What has evolved from her diligent documentation is a nuanced look at this complex disorder. I cannot turn away. The power of this collection is the ability to reveal the ebbs and flows of daily living with migraines that a single portrait could not hope achieve. Spending some time looking through all of these pictures I could sense the pain, and the frustration from the constant derailing of the days events, in a deeper way than other narratives could convey. I can't stop thinking about the power of this collection.

It is very hard to describe the migraine experience, and the host of symptoms that it can bring. Our current medical model of the pain scale does no justice to the incredible range of pain processes that can be experienced. I can't help but imagine a medical model that would allow me to flip through all these pictures of Lorie and pull out the ones that most closely represented what I was feeling, and the discussion around symptoms could start there.

Art becomes the perfect conduit to express these neurological processes in a more integrated way. Lorie represents the migraine not in a bubble, as we are meant to describe it to doctors, but migraine within the context of her day, her life, her responsibilities and her work. The pictures become a look at migraine as interruption, and the ways in which she has to intervene to take care of it, to manage it, to cater to it. These 'Migraine Portraits' are a powerful insight into the complexity of the migraine experience. Many other artists have written about their migraines, but perhaps no other art project has captured it so well and so completely. As someone who has navigated migraines for twenty years I am mesmerized by the accuracy of these pictures. Lorie has written that she hopes to publish the collection into a book, which would be a wonderful addition to any medical syllabus...